“Not offhand,” Hackberry lied.
“I once worked for Josef Sholokoff. He tried to have me killed. He sent three degenerates on motorcycles to do the job. Some poor Hispanic maid had to scrub them off the wallpaper in a motel room. I always felt bad about that. I mean leaving her to clean up such a mess.”
“Yes, you surely know how to write your name in big red letters, Mr. Collins. I don’t think Ted Bundy or Dennis Rader or Gary Ridgway or any of our other contemporary psychopaths quite meet your standards.”
“There are different kinds of killers in the world, Sheriff Holland. Some do it out of meanness. Some do it for hire. Some do it because they’re schizophrenic and attack imaginary enemies. Politicians have the military do it to increase the financial gain of corporations. Sholokoff takes it a step further. Ask yourself what kind of man would allow his people to vandalize a chapel and torture a female minister.”
“Sholokoff has declared war on the Creator?”
“You could say that. He’s a procurer. Is there anything lower than a man who lives off the earnings of a whore?”
“I don’t think you have a lot of moral authority in that area, Mr. Collins. You’re a murderer of innocent girls and women, which means you’re a moral and physical coward.”
“Could it be you who’s wanting in courage, Sheriff, and not me? Did you sit with a weapon by your hand while you waited on my call? Were you that fearful of a homeless man?”
Hackberry’s eyes swept the hillside, searching in the shadows that the trees and underbrush made on the slope. Then he examined the ridgeline and the trees growing up an arroyo and the outcroppings of sandstone and layers of table rock exposed by erosion, all the places that a man with binoculars could hide in the setting sun.
“You used a generic term. You said ‘weapon.’ What kind of weapon would that be, Mr. Collins?” Hackberry said.
“Maybe I was just trying to give you a start.”
“I always said you were quite a jokester.”
“That’s not what you just called me. You said I was a coward. I’m many things. But ‘coward’ isn’t among them. A coward fears death. But Death is my friend, Sheriff Holland. You remember the poem by e. e. cummings? How does it go? ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?’ The poet was talking of Buffalo Bill. Will you be corrupted by the grave like Buffalo Bill? Or will you be freed by it? Can you say you have no fear of the black hole that awaits you?”
“Rhetoric is cheap stuff.”
“Is it, now?”
“I’m going to sign off and ask that you not call again. I’ll be seeing you down the pike. This time out, there won’t be any warning.”
“You’re a judgmental man, Sheriff. As such, you may be the orchestrator of your own undoing.”
“I don’t think it’s going to play out that way.”
“Maybe you’ll rethink your attitude.”
The red dot of a laser sight appeared on the back of Hackberry’s left wrist and traveled up his arm and across his chest. Hackberry sucked in his breath involuntarily, as though a black widow or tarantula had crawled across his body. He tried to get to his feet as the red dot paused on his heart, but he fell back in the chair, knocking over the iced tea, his back aflame. The red dot dropped to his loins and touched his scrotum and then was gone, all in under two seconds, so fast he wondered if he had imagined the event. He stared into the black-green shadows on the hillside while rocks clacked and spilled from somewhere near the ridgeline and the dial tone of his cordless phone buzzed like an electrified horsefly in his hand.
He lay sleepless in his bed most of the night, furious that he had let himself be bested by a messianic poseur and mass killer like Preacher Jack Collins, then doubly furious that, in his anger, he was giving away power to Collins and letting Collins rob him of sleep and peace of mind and, finally, self-respect. He had known reformers and Bible- thumpers all his life, and not one of them, in his opinion, ever proved the exception when it came to obsession about sexuality: To a man, they feared their own desires and knew after waking from certain kinds of dreams what they would be capable of doing if the right situation presented itself. Every one of them was filled not with longing but with rage, and their rage always expressed itself in the same fashion: They wanted control of other people, and if they could not have control over them, they wanted them destroyed.
The legacy of Salem did not go away easily. Vigilantism, the Klan, the acolytes of Senator McCarthy and others of his stripe formed a continuous thread from 1692 to the present, Hackberry thought. But that did not change the fact that Hackberry had failed miserably in dealing with Jack Collins, who killed people whenever and wherever he wished and seemed to walk through walls or leave no indicators of his presence except the funnel- shaped tracks of an animal.
The next morning did not go well, either. The previous day Ethan Riser had shown little interest in the events at Anton Ling’s house, explaining that the break-in and the assault on her person did not constitute federal crimes and that Jack Collins’s appearance and departure from Anton Ling’s home provided no information or clue as to where he and Noie Barnum were hiding. “Let me call you back early tomorrow,” Riser had said. “I’ll try to find out where Josef Sholokoff is right now. If he’s here, we can probably step into things and leave a lot heavier footprint.”
“Why the sudden due diligence with Sholokoff and not our local residents?” Hackberry had said.
“Jack Collins is an aberration who will probably self-destruct. Sholokoff is a contagious disease. If he can get his hands on a working model of a Predator drone or its design, Al Qaeda will have it in twenty-four hours.”
“How would Sholokoff even know about Noie Barnum?”
“Temple Dowling used to be a silent business partner of his. We’ve had our eye on Dowling for a long time. He just doesn’t know it. Or care. Weren’t you associated politically with Dowling’s father?”
“Yeah, I was, much to my regret. I’ll expect your call early in the morning, Ethan,” Hackberry had replied.
But Riser did not call back, and Hackberry’s messages went unanswered. That afternoon another agent called Hackberry’s office and told him that Ethan Riser had gone back to Washington.
“What for?” Hackberry asked.
“Ask him when he gets back,” the agent said, and hung up.
Hackberry visited Anton Ling in the hospital but otherwise spent the rest of the day unproductively, still resenting himself for allowing Jack Collins to get inside his head. Or was something else bothering him as well?
That evening he drove to Pam Tibbs’s house with a gallon of vanilla ice cream and a six-pack of A amp;W root beer packed in his cooler. He rang the doorbell, then sat on the front steps, staring into a street lined with bungalows and two-story frame houses that had been built during the 1920s, the porches hung with swings, the flower beds blooming, American flags hanging from staffs inserted into metal sockets on many of the wood pillars. It was a neighborhood that belonged to another era, one for which most Americans are nostalgic, but the people who lived in the neighborhood did not recognize it as such.
Hackberry heard the back screen slam, then a moment later, a man backed a waxed red convertible into the street and drove away, his attention concentrated on the traffic. Pam opened the front door. “Hi, Hack,” she said.
He turned around and looked at her. She was wearing blue-jean shorts and a pink blouse and earrings and Roman sandals. “Hi,” he replied.
“You want to come in?”
“Who was the guy in the convertible?”
“My cousin.”
“I’ve never seen him. Does he live around here?”
“No.”
“So where does he live?”
“He’s a sales rep for a computer company. He travels a lot.”
“People who travel a lot don’t have addresses?”
“It’s none of your business, Hack.”
“You’re right, it isn’t.”
She looked at the six-pack of root beer next to Hack’s leg. The vapor on top of the cans was contracting, the
